Race and Class
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
6:08 AM
When a group experiences collective depression and economic hardship, they search for a cause for their poverty.  Conditions that create poverty are both complex and personally difficult. Economic hardship is often caused by both external factors and personal behaviors.  It is emotionally and intellectually easier to blame a person or group of people than to think about conditions and behaviors.  This preference to focus frustration on another group of people rather than on conditions and behaviors is feature of human nature. By itself it is dangerous enough.  However, the history of mob violence and genocide has been marked by unscrupulous leaders who have manipulated this feature and intentionally encouraged mob violence.  Two specific examples: post-emancipation lynching in the South and conflict in Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi.  
In post-Emancipation South, lynching became increasingly prevalent and increasingly racial.  Vigilante justice had always plagued us as a people after Emancipation it morphed into an uglier tool for race-based hatred.  James West Davidson in his book They Say:  Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race wrote, "Between 1880 and 1930 at least thirty-three hundred African Americans were murdered by mobs.  During the 1890s and early 1900s, two or three blacks on average were hanged, burned, or otherwise killed every week" (p. 8).    Ida B. Wells-Barnett exposed the practice of lynching.  The myth that sustained lynching was the myth that a black man lynched was guilty of raping a white woman.  Wells exposed this myth and revealed that often the feeling of being economically threatened by African-Americans advancement was the motivation.  Reconstruction created difficult economic conditions for both White and Black Americans in the South.  Rather than collaborating on mutually beneficial solutions, poor White directed aggression toward emerging Blacks and the ones who benefitted were the established economically powerful White leaders.  
In 1994, the Rwandan genocide took the lives of somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsi Rwandans.  The violence emerged from the Hutu-class and was directed toward the Tutsis.  The distinction between Tutsi and Hutu Rwandans goes back to the 14th Century when Tutsis migrated to what is now called Rwanda.  In the 17th Century, Tutsis established rule over the area and in the 19th Century Tutsis unified the region.  Also, in the mid-19th Century, European explorers arrived in the area, in the early 20th century Belgium was granted control of Rwanda--granted control by a Western-driven League of Nations.  The Belgians stirred the conflict between Hutu and Tutsi--people who had intermingled, inter-married and more or less coexisted for centuries.  Before the Belgians arrived the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was distinguishable, but it was less sharp.  While they were there Belgians favored the Tutsi and ruled Rwanda through them.  As the Belgians left in the 1960s, they contributed to the Hutu anger toward the Tutsi and inflamed the violence.  We cannot know what the history of Rwanda would have been without Western presence.  What we do know is that Western colonizers did accentuate the difference between two groups that erupted into horrendous violence in 1994.  
Here's what these two situations have in common:  
Harsh economic conditions.
Groups of people with economic similarities and ethnic differences.
Governing or economically profiting classes who encouraged the ethnic clashes between the groups who had economic similarities but salient ethnic differences.   
In the last two days, I've read a couple of articles suggesting that poor, white working-class frustration with a system that does not benefit them motivated them to vote for Trump.  These articles have suggested that it is economic frustration and not racism that has come to the surface in this election.  My reading of history tells me that the two things go hand-in-hand.  Understand, I'm not suggesting that poor whites are themselves racist.  I am suggested that we've been here before and the way it's been handled before is that those in power have left unaddressed the conditions that lead to poverty.  They have chosen instead to fuel the perception that our problems come from a who and not a what.  This leads to inevitable reactions that whoever has been identified as the problem deserves people's ire and their efforts.  Racist violence has been carried out most often by mobs containing the poor, but the direction and moral sanction for such violence has been given by those with material wealth and political power.  The combination of economic hardship along with ethnic groupings is a deadly combination by itself.  This natural tinder box can either by ignited through rhetoric that plays one group off another or it can be mitigated through a needed attention on people's needs.  
We are at a crossroads.  This election has exposed the deep-seeded struggles and frustrations of many Americans.  We will either continue to blame someone else for these problems or we will do the hard work of addressing the conditions and, yes, our own personal behaviors that create the mess we're in.  President-elect Trump has seemed to provide fuel for both directions.  At times, he has villainized one group and then another.  At other times, he has focused on conditions that create the problem: inadequate employment opportunities, failing infrastructure, and a lack of communication between governing and governed people.  Many people want to keep the focus on the inflammatory rhetoric from the campaign.  I understand that.  People targeted by this rhetoric are scared.  While officially the new administration seems to be stepping back from the extremism of the campaign, the shadow this rhetoric has cast and the threatening potentials remain. It doesn't help a situation for people to be safe but not feel safe.  Moreover, too many people have taken this election as permission to act out independently.  Silence does not help.  We must say clearly and directly that violence is rarely the answer and even when it is, it’s an incomplete one.  Initiating violence toward someone because of ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation, or religion is a sin.  
At the same time, we must encourage and support the focus on conditions.  We may not agree on specifics on how to fix the problems with the Affordable Care Acts, the problems with trade agreements, the problems with the management of the Federal government.  Nonetheless, if these problems and the proposed solutions are indeed the problem-cause-solution analysis of the duly elected administration, then we must accept that this is what the democratic system has asked the in-coming administration to address.  We can ask the President-Elect to say again and with greater clarity that his election does not represent the triumph of white nationalism nor of discrimination nor of bigotry.  We can urge them to keep their focus on the conditions and causes of so many people's frustrations and to direct the nation's attention that our problems are not generated by people who appear to be different.  Our problems are complex and we contribute to them in ways we may be unwilling to admit.  And we can focus our attention on these problems as ourselves. 